An often compelling blend of practical advice about resisting political crackdowns.
Reid provides a guidebook for surviving and handling life in authoritarian times.
The author, a University of California, San Diego, professor emeritus and the host of the politics and culture podcast UnSafe Thoughts, states that “the rapid deterioration of our political life” since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration in 2025 is what prompted him to update his 2017 primer on the challenges of living under, and resisting, increasingly authoritarian rule. He primarily seeks to find words for what American society is currently experiencing and possibly chart a way through it all. He provides readers with historical overviews of civil unrest in various periods and fleshes out accounts of government overreach and police offenses that occurred as a result: “The persistence of police killings in the age of smart phone cameras testifies to officers’ sense of impunity,” he writes, “and to the growing public spectacle of wanton violence that exploits its very visibility as a form of political and social intimidation of entire communities.” This timely updated edition went to press the same month that two Minneapolis civilians were killed by ICE agents, in separate incidents; the agency’s violent tactics have lately been employed in that city, among others. The topic of intimidation of communities naturally moves the narrative to the author’s main subject: Trump’s presidencies and the long series of irresponsible, immoral, or illegal actions that his administrations have taken in the last decade of American life—during which Trump took a Republican Party that had previously been characterized as “an exclusive country club” and transformed it into the spectacle of Trumpism.
To push back against this phenomenon, Reid adapts some of the customary guidelines for dealing with political intimidation to fit new realities, encouraging readers to stage massive rallies, pool funds for bail and legal expenses, protest outside ICE agents’ hotels, mock Trump administration officials in public, and engage in other strategies, with an emphasis on nonviolence; he adds the traditional caveat to avoid “responding violently to armed provocation by the authorities and their civilian allies.” Reid’s 13 strategies for resisting political intimidation, elaborated in detail over the course of this book, are thoughtful and well articulated, and they include such advice as educating members of the public about the issues at hand and examining the potential vulnerabilities of the resistance. Regarding government authorities, he reminds his readers that it’s “important to remember there is no psychological, social, or ethical boundary that they won’t violate.” He ends the work with a series of generous and very helpful endnotes. Reid’s persistent optimism throughout this book will come as a comfort to many news-weary readers, who may be discouraged by the fact that government agents have continued to use extreme violence against protestors—including those who’ve exercised strategies that are very similar to those in this book. Resistance, he writes, “is about separating ourselves from our fear and undoing fear as the ground of our collective existence.” Many readers, looking for hopeful guidance, will be cheered by how the author so clearly lays out such ideas.
An often compelling blend of practical advice about resisting political crackdowns.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2025
ISBN: 9798999925909
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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